[kwlug-disc] experiment: expose the targeting

[Chris Frey]

I was reading about the targeting of news and searches recently, and
thought back to what Doug Moen was writing about in another thread,
how someone's IP, cookies, browser fingerprint, etc, can be used to
craft your internet experience.

The thought occurred to me: it would be interesting to have an easy
way to share internet resources in order to peek at the taylored
messages other people are getting, and what you're *not* getting.

Some of the tech needed for this would be:

	1) a shared VM or set of VM's with clean OS's
	2) multiple clean browsers on those OS's
	3) a vpn from the VM to a participating member of the experiment
	4) a list of search engines and news sites to examine
	5) a way to publish the results for everyone to see

I think everything except #3 could be automated by a single person
interested.  For #3, we'd need some automated way to temporarily share
internet for an experimental run.  Perhaps once a week, if we wanted
to see results over time.

This sounds like a fair bit of work, but I think the results would be
quite eye opening.

Any other pieces that could be added?  Any other ideas that I'm overlooking?

- Chris